Quoting Raffi Krikorian :
hi everyone,
as you all know, Twitter has been faced with considerable capacity problems
in recent weeks. we have many efforts under way to expand capacity and more
efficiently use the capacity we have. starting today, we're going to begin
adjusting rate limits dynamically under load in order to maintain an awesome
experience for as many users as possible.
today, we're experimenting with moving rate limits for all clients to
varying amounts during periods of high load. you might see rate limits
change from the default of 350 calls / hour. you may even see different
values as we monitor the effect these changes have on overall Twitter
performance.
this means that it's more important than ever for client applications to
monitor their rate limits through the HTTP headers and
account/rate_limit_status and adjust your client's behavior accordingly.
we're happy to help you achieve that, and please reach out to us if you
need that help (either through this mailing list, or through @twitterapi).
we understand that this might cause some issues in some clients, and will
certainly impact the amount of requests your users can make to Twitter.
however, the entire ecosystem will be more performant and you will see fewer
whales on write operations (like posting tweets).
thank you everyone for your continued patience.
--
Raffi Krikorian
Twitter Platform Team
http://twitter.com/raffi
And many, many thanks to Twitter for doing this! I've been wanting
something like this for a long time. Any chance this could get
extended to the Search API? Right now, there's little we can do except
manually tune around the "Enhance your calm" messages.
